While a semiconductor switching element is turning-on, a recovery current causes a radiated noise and a turn-on loss for instance. Conversely, while the semiconductor switching element is turning-off, a surge voltage causes an overvoltage and a turn-off loss for instance. As such, the semiconductor switching element behaves in a different manner during its turn-on and turn-off operations in driving its switching operations. Accordingly, the turn-on and the turn-off operations need to have switching speeds (hereinafter referred to as “SW speeds”) different from each other.
In order to individually control the SW speeds of the turn-on and turn-off operations, a buffer circuit has been proposed that includes a complementary single ended push pull (hereinafter abbreviated as a “complementary SEPP”) circuit (e.g., Patent Document 1). Patent Document 1 discloses a technique for preventing a reverse voltage of an NPN transistor and a reverse voltage of a PNP transistor that constitute the complementary SEPP, thereby enabling the complementary SEPP circuit to stably operate.